by Jane Yolen
Some confusion over the intricately engraved silver rings found in the Arrundale gravemound still exists. Sigel and Salmon call them “wand holders,” giving credence to Magon’s shaky thesis, but there is even more evidence that these artifacts are napkin rings or possibly pack cups for long trips, and that is convincingly argued in Cowan’s “Rings of the Clans” in Nature and History, Vol. 51.
THE STORY:
Selna’s shameful behavior became the talk of the Hame. Though sisters had quarreled before, little fiery arguments that sent a moment of heat and light and then died down without even embers of memory, what Selna did was unheard of. Even the priestess’ records mentioned nothing like it, and the Hame had seventeen generations listed and eight great tapestries as well.
Selna stayed in the bright sunlight with her child during the day and at night, babe bound fast to her breast or back, avoided the well-lighted rooms of the Hame. Once or twice, when it was absolutely unavoidable and Selna had to come into a torchlit room, Marjo crept behind her, a thin, attenuated figure. Gone was the dark sister’s robust laughter, her hearty ringing tones.
“Selna,” she would cry to her sister’s back with a voice like a single strand of sigh, “what is wrong between us?” It was a ghost’s voice, hollow and dying. “Selna …”
Once, in the kitchen begging some milk for the babe, Selna turned for a moment when Marjo called. She put her hands over the child’s ears as if to block out the sound of her sister’s voice, though it was so low by now it could scarcely be heard. Behind her, Donya and her own sister Doey and two of the older girls watched in horror. They saw in Marjo’s wasting figure their own slow death.
Marjo’s eyes, the color of bruises, wept black tears. “Sister, why do you do this? I would share the child with you. I have no wish to stand between.”
But Selna turned slowly and deliberately away from the pleading figure, back toward the kitchen’s light. When she noticed Donya and Doey and the two girls standing there, stricken, she bowed her head and hunched her shoulders up as if expecting a blow. Then she turned and went back without the milk into the darkest part of the hall.
On the thirteenth day of her shame, the priestess banished her from the Hame.
“My daughter,” the priestess said, her voice heavy, “you have brought this upon yourself. We cannot stop what you do to your own dark sister. Once you accepted the teachings of the Book of Light, we could instruct you no more. What falls between the two of you is your own concern. But the Hame is shattered. We cannot continue to watch what you do. So you must leave us and finish out what you have so ill begun alone.”
“Alone?” Selna asked. For the first time her voice quivered. She had not been alone for as long as she could remember. She clutched baby Jenna to her.
“You have thrust your own dark sister from you,” said the priestess. “You have shamed us all. The child stays here.”
“No!” Selna cried, turning. By her side, the gray shadow that was Marjo turned, too. But they ran into six sturdy warriors who pinned them against the wall and took the babe, despite Selna’s screams and pleading.
They took Selna out into the bright day, which meant she would be truly alone at the start of her journey, with only the clothes she wore. Her bow, sword, and gutting knife they threw after her, tied in a heavy bag that took her near an hour to unknot. They said nothing to her, not even a word of farewell, for so the priestess had instructed them.
She left the Hame by day, but she returned that night, a shadow among shadows, and stole away the child.
There were no guards by the infant’s cot. Selna knew there would be none. The women of the Hame would be sure she would never return, so shamed and low had they left her. They would trust in the guards of the outer gates. But Selna was a warrior, the best of them, and often she and Marjo had played among the secret passageways. So silently, Selna stole back in, more quietly even than a shadow. She doused three lights along the hallways before Marjo’s pale voice could alert the sleepers.
Jenna awoke and recognized her foster mother’s smell. Giving a satisfied sound, she fell asleep again. It was that small wisp of sound that confirmed Selna’s determination. She raced down the secret ways and was at the forest’s edge again before it was dawn.
As she slipped along the old paths where the rocks were worn smooth by the passage of so many feet, the birds heralded her arrival. She found the large boulder off to the side of the path where she had left her weapons. Shamed as she was, she would still not have raised her sword or bow against her Hame mates. Leaning back against the rock, into a niche that seemed to exactly fit her body, she slipped her tunic down to her waist. Now that she was truly the child’s mother, she could nurse it as well. She gave the baby her breast. For a few moments Jenna sucked eagerly, but when no milk came, she turned her head to the side and wailed.
“Hush!” Selna said sharply, taking the child’s face between her fingers and squeezing. “A warrior must be silent.”
But the baby, hungry and frightened, cried even more.
Selna shook the infant roughly, unaware that tears were coursing down her own cheeks. Startled, the child stopped crying. Then Selna stood up and looked around, making sure no one had been alerted by the child’s cries. When she heard nothing, she sat back down, leaned against the rock, and slept, the baby in her arms.
But Jenna did not sleep. Restless and hungry, she caught at dust motes in the rays of the sun that filtered through the canopy of aspen and birch. At last she put her tiny hand into her mouth and sucked noisily.
It was hours before Selna awoke, and when she did the sun was already high overhead and a fox was puzzling on the edge of the small clearing, its sharp little muzzle poking into the undergrowth. At Selna’s waking, it looked up, ears stiff with warning, then turned abruptly and disappeared into the shadows.
Selna stretched and looked at the babe sleeping on her lap. She smiled, touching Jenna’s white hair. In the sunlight she could see the infant’s pink scalp under the fine hair and the beating of the pulse beneath the shield of skin.
“You are mine,” she whispered fiercely. “I shall care for you. I shall protect you. I shall feed you. I—and no others.”
At her voice, Jenna awoke and her cry was cranky and thin.
“You are hungry. So am I,” Selna said quietly. “I shall find us both something to eat.”
She pulled up her tunic and bound the child to her back, slipping the ribbands under her own arms, tight enough so that the child was safe, loose enough so that they both could move. Holding her bow and sword in her left hand, she slipped the gutting knife into its sheath over her right shoulder where she could reach it for a fast throw. Then she began loping down the forest paths.
She was lucky. She found tracks of a small rabbit, stalked it easily, and brought it down with a light arrow at the first try. Fearing to make a large fire still so close to the Hame, she nevertheless knew better than to eat a rabbit raw. So she dug a deep hole and made a small fire there, enough to at least sear the meat. She chewed it, then spit the juices into Jenna’s mouth. After the second try, the babe did not refuse the offering and sucked it up eagerly, mouth to mouth.
“As soon as I can, I will find you milk,” Selna promised, wiping the baby’s mouth and then tickling her under the chin. “I will hire out to guard one of the small border towns. Or I will find the High King’s army. They like Alta’s warriors. They will not refuse me.”
Jenna smiled her response, her little hands waving about in the air. Selna kissed her on the brow, feeling the brush of the child’s white hair under her nose, as soft as the wing of a butterfly. Then she bound the baby on her back again.
“We have many more miles to go tonight before I will feel safe,” Selna said. She did not add that she wanted to stay the night in the forest because the full moon was due and she could not bear to speak to her pale shadow and explain all that she had done.
THE LEGEND:
In the dark forest near Altashame
there is a clearing. Under a stand of white birch grows a red-tipped iris. The people who live in Selkirk, on the west side of the forest, say that three ghosts may be seen on the second moon of each year. One is a warrior woman, a dark necklace at her throat. The second is her shadowy twin. And the third is a snow-white bird that flies above them crying with a child’s voice. At dawn the two women strike each other with their swords. Where their blood falls the iris springs up, as white as the bird, as red as the blood. “Snow-iris,” the folk of the East call the flower. “Cold Heart,” say the folk from the South. “But “Sister’s Blood” is the Selkirk name, and the people of that town leave the flowers alone. Though the juice from the iris heart binds up a woman in her time of troubles and gives her relief from flashes of heat, the Selkirk folk will not touch so much as a leaf of the flower, and they will not go into the clearing after dark.
THE STORY:
At the edge of a small clearing, a short run to the outskirts of the town of Seldenkirk, Selna rested. Leaning against a small oak which protected her from the bright full moon, she caught her breath and dropped both bow and sword. Her breathing was so labored at first, she did not hear the noise and then, when she heard it, it was already too late. Strong, callused hands grabbed her from behind and twisted a knife point into the hollow below her chin.
She stopped herself from crying out in pain, and then the knife slipped down and carved a circle of blood like a necklace around her throat.
“These be the only jewels an Alta-slut should own,” came the gruff voice behind her. “You be mighty far from your own, my girl.”
She fell to her knees, trying to twist and protect the child at her back, and the movement frightened the man, who jammed the knife deep in her throat. She tried to scream but no sound came out.
The man laughed raggedly and ripped her tunic down the front, exposing her breasts and belly. “Built like a boy,” he said disgustedly. “Your kind be good only dying or dead.” He grabbed her by one leg and pulled her out from the forest onto the softer grass of the moonlit clearing. Then he tried to turn her from her side onto her back.
She could not scream, though she could still fight him. But another woman screamed from behind, a strange gurgling.
Startled, he looked over his shoulder, saw a twin of the first woman, her own throat banded by a black line of blood. Turning back, he realized his mistake, for Selna had managed to get her hand on her knife. With the last remaining strength in her arm, she threw the knife at his face. It hit him cleanly between the eyes. But Selna did not see it, for she had already rolled over on her stomach and died, her fingertips touching Marjo’s.
The man tried to get to his feet, managed only to his knees, then fell on top of Selna, the handle of the knife between his eyes coming to rest in baby Jenna’s hand. She held on to it and cried.
They were found in the morning by a shepherd who always took his flock to that clearing, where the spring grass was sweetest. He arrived just before sunrise and thought he saw three dead folk by the clearing’s edge. When he got to them, pushing his way through his reluctant sheep, he saw that there were only two: a woman, her throat cut, and a man, a gutting knife between his eyes. A silent infant was holding on to the bloody knife handle as if she herself had set it on its deadly path.
The shepherd ran all the way back to Seldenkirk, forgetting his sheep, who bleated around the ghastly remains. When he returned, with six strong ploughboys and the portly high sheriff, only the man lay there, on his back, in a circle of sheep. The dead woman, the babe, the knife, and one of the shepherd’s nursing ewes were gone.
THE BALLAD:
The Ballad of the Selden Babe
Do not go down, ye maidens all,
Who wear the golden gown,
Do not go to the clearing
At the edge of Seldentown,
For wicked are the men who wait
To bring young maidens down.
A maiden went to Seldentown,
A maid no more was she,
Her hair hung loose about her neck,
Her gown about her knee,
A babe was slung upon her back,
A bonny babe was he.
She went into the clearing wild,
She went too far from town,
A man came up behind her
And he cut her neck aroun’,
A man came up behind her
And he pushed that fair maid down.
“And will ye have your way wi’ me,
Or will ye cut me dead,
Or do ye hope to take from me
My long-lost maidenhead?
Why have ye brought me far from town
Upon this grass-green bed?”
He never spoke a single word,
Nor gave to her his name,
Nor whence and where his parentage,
Nor from which town he came,
He only thought to bring her low
And heap her high wi’ shame.
But as he set about his plan
And went about his work,
The babe upon the maiden’s back
Had touched her hidden dirk,
And from its sheath had taken it
All in the clearing’s mirk.
And one and two, the tiny hands
Did fell the evil man,
Who all upon his mother had
Commenced the wicked plan.
God grant us all such bonny babes
And a good and long life span.
THE STORY:
The priestess called off the banishment, for four of the hunters had found Selna’s body hand in hand with Marjo. The hunters had melted quickly back into the forest when the shepherd had appeared, waited out his discovery, then taken Selna, the babe, and the ewe back to the Hame.
“Our sisters are once more with us,” the priestess said, and she made Alta’s mark—the circle and the crux—on Selna’s forehead when she met the hunters with their sad burden at the great gate. “Bring her in. The child also. She now belongs to us all. No one of us shall mother her alone.”
“The prophecy, Mother,” Amalda cried out, and many echoed her. “Is this the child spoke of?”
The priestess shook her head. “The Book speaks of a thrice-orphaned babe and this sweetling has lost but two mothers, her first mother and Selna.”
“But, Mother,” Amalda continued, “was not Marjo her mother as well?”
The priestess’ mouth grew tight. “We may not help a prophecy along, sister. Remember that it is written that Miracles come to the unsuspecting. I have spoken. The child will not have one mother here at Alta’s-hame hereafter but a multitude.” She twisted her long braid through her fingers.
The women murmured amongst themselves, but at last they agreed she was right. So they set Selna’s corpse into the withy burial basket and brought her into the infirmarer’s room. There they washed and dressed her body, brushed her hair until it shone, then twined the top withes of the basket closed.
It took six of them, one at each corner of the basket and two at head and foot, to carry the burden up Holy Hill to the great mazed cave, Alta’s Rock, where the bodies of generations of sisters lay wrapped and preserved, under blazing torches.
Though they went up to Alta’s Rock at noon, they waited until night for the ceremony, eating sparingly of the fruits they had brought with them. They spoke quietly of Selna’s life, of her hunting skills and her fearlessness, her quick temper and her quicker smile. And they spoke as often of Marjo, not the pale shadow, but the hearty, laughing companion.
Kadreen remarked that it was Alta’s luck that had led them to find Selna’s body.
“No, sister, it was the skill of my sisters and me. We trailed her through several nights, and if she had not been out of her mind, we would never have picked up her trail, for she was the best of us,” said Amalda.
Kadreen shook her head and placed her hand on Amalda’s shoulder. “I mean, sister, that it was Alta’s gracious gift that we have her body wit
h us at Holy Hill, for how many of our own lie far away in unmarked graves?”
When the moon rose, the group on the Hill was almost doubled, the children alone without dark sisters.
Marjo’s body appeared in its own basket by Selna’s side, the withy latticework as finely done as her sister’s.
Then the priestess, her voice ragged with sorrow, began. “For our sisters who are united even in death,” she said, then breaking a moment out of the ritual whispered to the two corpses, “There is nothing wrong between you now.”
Donya drew a loud, groaning breath, and the two kitchen maids burst into tears.
The priestess sang the first of the seven praises, with the others quickly joining in, singing the parts they had known from childhood.
In the name of Alta’s cave,
The dark and lonely grave …
When the seventh was done, and only the last lovely echo lingered in the air, they picked up the baskets and carried Selna and Marjo into the cave.
Donya and her dark sister were the last, Donya carrying the white-haired babe, who was so full of ewe’s milk she slept peacefully on the kitchener’s ample breast.
THE MYTH:
Then Great Alta said, “There shall be one of you, my only daughter, who shall be thrice born and thrice orphaned. She shall lie by a dead mother’s side three times yet shall herself live. She shall be queen above all things yet queen she will not be. She shall carry a babe for each mother, yet mother them not. The three shall be as one and begin the world anew. So I say and so shall it be.”
